


it's many hundred miles and it won't be long

by rattlingbones



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Accidental Coparenting, Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Alternate Universe - Modern, F/F, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-07 02:50:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5440703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rattlingbones/pseuds/rattlingbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Being subtly menaced by a girl who still wore her hair in pigtail braids wasn't how Raven had expected her morning to go, but c'est la vie.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Raven, Abby, and ten-year-old Clarke go on a road trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's many hundred miles and it won't be long

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meqhanory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meqhanory/gifts).



> jsyk going in: Raven and Abby both work at NASA in this AU but there's very little actual science in this story (none, actually) and I don't know how NASA works beyond google search/a couple documentaries so real-world accuracy is low. this story is mostly just road trip/Clarke being terrifying/accidental coparenting/developing romance. 
> 
> sorry it isn't complete--I will try to have the rest up within the week.

Raven couldn’t fly anymore.

  
Her doctor said a lot of gibberish that amounted to that fact. She'd been a little too in shock-pain-rage about the fact that she'd never even walk normally again to listen at the time. Something about the way her leg being mangled in the accident that made blood clots a Thing if there were drastic changes in air pressure or at a high altitude or something.

  
She was also no longer allowed to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. Not that she could, with her leg, but still.

  
This was how Raven found herself coordinating carpool with Dr. Abigail _fucking_ Griffin. It's actually less of a carpool and more of a thirty hour, desert road trip with Dr. Abigail _fucking_ Griffin, head of medical research at the Agency, and her ten-year-old daughter.

  
They were in the commissary, awkwardly trying to negotiate whose car to take (Raven's, she's got her car rigged to accommodate her leg), who's paying for gas (split evenly because Raven has her pride and no way in hell are they doing 33-66 like Dr. Griffin tried to offer), what sort of music is appropriate to be played around a ten-year-old (not much good stuff), and what supplies to bring for a thirty hour road trip (a stress ball and as much headache medicine as one could legally buy in California).

  
“I think,” Dr. Abigail _fucking_ Griffin said as she picked at the seam of the paper coffee cup, “We should split the drive into three ten-hour days. Trying to make fifteen hours in two days is...not likely to go well.”

  
No shit. Thirty hours in a station wagon, listening to One Direction or whatever it was ten-year-olds liked, surrounded by the desolate wastelands that are the highways of Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas, with a prepubescent child in the backseat was unlikely to go well no matter however many days they spread it out over.

  
Suffering is part of the human condition.

  
Raven shrugged. “Fine by me.”

  
Dr. Abigail _fucking_ Griffin smiled then, soft and sweet. Raven kind of wanted to flip the table, call off the arrangement, and run back to her patch of territory in the mechanics' wing. Her leg made the escape part of the plan unfeasible, but she could give it the old college try.

  
“Okay, well, I'll text you our address.”

  
“Sure thing,” Raven said. “Pick you and your daughter up at 0700, Saturday, Dr. Griffin.”

  
Dr. Abigail _fucking_ Griffin laughed, all pearly teeth and bright-dark eyes, and said, “Please, Raven. Call me Abby.”

  
Raven realized she was completely screwed.  


 

 

  
Dr. Griffin, Abby, was kind of a legend around the Ames. She was the head of medical research program monitoring the effects of basically, space and the entire universe that wasn't Earth, on the astronauts' health. She was on the administrative council. She had a PhD and an MD. She led the committee that chose which experiments would be conducted inflight and on the space station. She was married to astronaut Jake Griffin and they had a daughter together.

  
Then Jake Griffin died.

 

 

  
  
Abby's daughter had shiny blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and baby-faced scowl. She looked like Barbie's younger, angrier, sister. Raven thought she looked nothing like Abby when she pulled up, but once she cut the engine and climbed out of the car she could see the resemblance in the set of their shoulders, the line of their noses, and most of all the tense energy radiating off them both. Raven recognized that as the telltale sign of a mother-daughter argument, likely only to have ended with her arrival.

  
Raven raised an eyebrow and asked, “All packed and ready, then?”

  
“Yes,” Abby said. “We've got a couple of duffels. I hope it's not too much.”

  
“Nah. This rolling scrap metal may be butt-ugly and older than my grandma,” Raven elbowed the station wagon that was practically a relic. “But it's like that bag from Harry Potter. You could fit a small army in here. And I do all my own work so it runs like a dream.”

  
Abby and her daughter both nodded—another similarity in the determined dip of their chins as they did so—and Abby grabbed their bags and headed toward the trunk.

  
Abby's daughter, though, marched right up to Raven and stuck out her hand. “Hi. I'm Clarke.”

  
Raven shook her hand. “I'm Raven. Nice to meet you.”

  
“I'm glad you're making this trip with us,” Clarke said. She didn't sound glad at all. “But it's very important that we make it to Houston on time. I have to be there for the launch.” She clutched the bulk of her backpack closer as she talked, like someone running by might try to snatch it away at any second.

  
Being subtly menaced by a girl who still wore her hair in pigtail braids wasn't how Raven had expected her morning to go, but c'est la vie.

  
Raven snorted. “I'm not driving all that way for my health, kid. No way are we missing it.”

  
Clarke nodded again, her small face as serious as if they had just negotiated cessation of hostilities between warring nations. She relaxed after that.

  
When Clarke Griffin smiled she truly looked like Abby.

 

 

  
  
  
Raven drove first. Abby took the passenger seat, hands folded prettily in her lap or flipping idly through a gardening magazine, humming lowly along to the music. Clarke slouched in the middle backseat with headphones on and a library book about horses open on her lap.

  
Raven tried to focus on the road, but often she caught her attention and gaze drifting to the woman in passenger seat.

  
And sometimes: Abby was looking back at Raven.  


 

  
Clarke started a bar fight in Arizona.

  
They weren’t even supposed to be in the bar. But it was the closest place with a toilet when Clarke declared “I MUST go to the ladies’ room RIGHT NOW” while they were speeding down the freeway. The bar’s not even ten miles across the border from California into Arizona; Raven knew because they’d passed the greeting center/tourist trap that accompanied the “Welcome to Arizona! The ‘Not Quite As Bad As Florida, But Still Pretty Terrible’ State”.

  
The bartender glared at them when he saw Clarke but didn’t say anything when she disappeared into the dingy hallway marked with stick figures. Raven ordered three bottles of water and a basket of chips while Abby wiped down a couple stools with napkins.

  
“Sorry about this,” Abby said. “I tried to get her to go at the gas station.”

  
Raven shook her head. “It’s no big deal.”

  
They sat together, picking at the stale chips and not speaking. The radio was playing low and the only other people in the bar were a trio of broad-shouldered, greasy-haired men in the corner, all of whom seemed to be nursing hangovers.

  
Raven figured this was as good a chance as any to try to get to know Abby better. By striking up casual conversation. Casual conversation such as ‘by the way, you’re the hottest person I know’ or ‘so this is funny: I’ve had an embarrassing crush on you for ages’. Raven was trying to come up with a way to non-creepily bring those up but wasn’t having much luck.

  
That was when there was a loud crash, followed almost immediately by the sound of shattering glass. Then an oddly-shaped figure appeared in the doorway. It took a long moment to realize what exactly the figure was. It was Clarke: she was clinging to the back of a man, her legs around his waist exposing the flower pattern on the soles of her sneakers, small fingers of one hand jammed up his nostrils while her other hand dug into his shoulder for purchase. The man was yelling incomprehensibly while Clarke clawed at him, and for a moment everyone in the bar--Raven, Abby, the bartender, the hung-over men in the corner--were all frozen in confusion.

  
Clarke snarled and bit into the man’s ear. The man screeched. And everyone else remembered they were capable of movement.

  
The bartender and one of the men in the corner yelled “Tristan!” and Raven thought _oh shit_. There’s no way the story was going to be accurately told to the police if the bar was the man’s regular watering hole and all the other witnesses were his friends.

  
One of the other men sprung up, grabbed something off the wall, and started toward the man and Abby’s daughter.

  
Raven hadn’t even realized she’d moved, let alone managed to get all the way across the room when she whacked the guy with her cane. From the corner of her eye she saw a fist coming from one of the other guys, so she ducked and then hit his kneecaps with her cane. He crumpled, and Raven whacked both him and the first guy a couple more times each with the cane again just to be sure.

  
She looked up just in time to see Abby plant one hell of a right hook on Tristan’s stomach. He was so winded he stumbled back into the doorframe and hit the back of his head before sliding down the floor. Like his friends, he wasn’t unconscious, but he definitely wasn’t moving. The third man, the one Raven hadn’t hit with her cane, was also on the floor. There was a chair with a broken off leg beside him, and Raven realized Abby must have done that.

  
Abby was panting and there was a sheen of sweat across her forehead. Raven’s already embarrassing crush on Abby reached new levels.

  
Clarke, who had blood around her mouth and a manic gleam in her eye, chose that moment to announce: “If we weren’t on a schedule, I would _burn everything you love_.”

  
Raven looked at Abby. Abby looked at Raven. They both looked at the bar tender (who was semi-crouched behind the counter and open-mouthed) and then to the men on the floor (who were eyeing them from the floor, faces varying mixtures of rage and disbelief).

  
Without discussion, Raven scooped the water bottles they’d paid for into her bag and Abby grabbed Clarke by the hand and tugged her toward the door. They were in the car and back on the highway driving well over the speed limit in less than a minute.

 

 

  
  
They drove in silence for hours after that incident. The sunset was illuminating the desert around them and there was nothing but dirt and sky and road for miles in every direction when Abby finally pulled over without warning.

  
She twisted around in the front seat to face Clarke. “Did that man try to hurt you?”

  
Clarke hesitated. “No.”

  
Abby gave the tight nod Raven was coming to recognize as both Griffins’ way acknowledging something rather than agreeing with it. “What happened?”

  
Clarke shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  
“What,” Abby said, hard and deliberate. “Happened?”

  
Clarke bit her lip and her eyes flicked to meet Raven’s in the rearview mirror. Raven didn’t blink. _I’m not backing you up on this one, kid._

  
Clarke sighed. “He was wearing a Grounders pin.”

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from "train song" by vashti bunyan
> 
> I was thrilled to be matched with you for this challenge, paiqeturco, and I really hope you enjoy this. :) I'm [kingclarkegriffin](http://kingclarkegriffin.tumblr.com/) over at tumblr, btw.


End file.
